


Burning Bridges & Broken Hearts

by CaffeinatedWriter



Series: Abandoned Works [1]
Category: Bully (Video Games)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, M/M, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2018-04-07 08:26:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4256370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaffeinatedWriter/pseuds/CaffeinatedWriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gary’s entire world is burning down around him, but he’s handling it pretty well, which is to say, not at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Bridges & Broken Hearts

The true repercussions of the breakup don’t hit him immediately.

First comes the missing Jimmy part, something that hits him hard and sudden the moment the other boy left the room with an air of finality, but missing Jimmy isn’t anything he was unfamiliar with on a day to day basis.

He and Jimmy have always been on different levels academic-wise. Jimmy was street smart, and he did well when he put the effort in, but school had always come easily to Gary when he was capable of focusing. They had different schedules as a result, different classes and different lunch periods, and hardly ever saw each other during school hours.

It’s not something that he’s proud enough to boast about, but he’d dealt with that irritating urge to see the other boy with unspoken grace. Easy.

Oddly enough though, there’s a substantial difference between the manageable, pathetic twinge of loneliness that came from not seeing each other all day and the soul crushing, equally pathetic feeling that came from a week straight with no end in sight.

Missing Jimmy is an understatement at this point.

It sucks, of course it does, but he’s a Smith, and that has to stand for something or he’s really been left with nothing.

So he deal with it without giving himself time to fully think it through. If he does that, if he acknowledges completely that Jimmy’s absence in his life is permanent, then it’s going to be even harder to deal with.

Gary doesn’t like to think of forevers. Right nows are hard enough.

The first time he realizes the full extent of how deep this runs, he opens his mouth to say something to Pete. Not a jab or something biting, a casual comment about something he can’t even remember anymore, only to have the boy stare at him like he’d lost his mind. Or that he’s missing something.

It’s enough to have him stalling, mouth slowly closing and morphing into something of confused displeasure when the boy turns and leaves their room without a word to him. Gary picks up the sound of Jimmy laughing in the hallway, Pete joining in hesitantly.

Sharp pain in his chest, like he’s been stabbed, but it numbs into something duller and pressing.

He slides down the wall, fingers grasping at the chipped wood of his bed frame as an anchor as realization kicks in slowly in the way that things are capable of doing now that his meds are properly balanced.

Usually, he’s grateful for it. Now, he just wishes everything could have hit him at once, a week ago so maybe he’d be on his way to being over it by now.

Probably not, but at least it would put an end to this constant barrage of heartbreak he wants to pretend he’s too put together for. It’s laughable though, to pretend he’s put together at all. Gary is a lot of things and fakes at being even more, but capable of dealing properly with basic life problems is not one of them.

He blames his mother for his poor coping skills, but, like his mother, he refuses to be defeated by them.

It’s just, they have history, him and Pete.

Pete was his friend first, his first friend ever, and a member of an elusive club that most people didn’t even want membership to. The other boy had wanted to be his friend, and they were friends, absolutely must have been for all that Pete followed him around with blind faith for most of their childhood.

Everything changed the year Jimmy came, after everything that happened, and he accepts his part of the blame for that. It’s not something he can deflect on anyone else, but he’s come to terms with it already.

He’s made his peace, made amends, because for all the shit he gave Pete on a regular basis, their friendship had always been pretty solid.

He loves Pete in exactly the same way he loved—loves—Zoe.

They were good, or at least, he thought they were, but now he’s got Pete acting like their painfully awkward heart to heart almost two years ago never happened.

It’s not fair, really. Gary put a lot of effort in not bolting during a conversation about feelings and apologies and a hundred other things Gary doesn’t do, but that he’d readily done for Pete. Sincerely even.

Afterward, reassured and sheltered by the relatively new safety of Jimmy’s bed and the boy himself, he’d admitted how relieved he’d been for the easy acceptance of his apology. Because it meant that things had changed, but Pete hadn’t really. Some things were still the same, and there was comfort in that.

Change is hard for him, harder than most things, but he struggles to adapt. There’s been too many hard lessons about how far pity parties and dwelling on failure didn’t get you for him to dig his heels into the ground and throw a fit over it.

Despite that, things had felt different, definitely so, but he’d been so wrapped up in Jimmy and relationship and security, it hadn’t occurred to him to figure out why. Pete had every right to be cautious in the rebuilding of their relationship, and Gary figured if he went about business as usual, eventually everything would fall back into place.

Time healed everything.

It’s becoming more and more apparent that it absolutely did not. No brainer why as far as Pete was concerned.

His primary goal right now should be to become less oblivious, clearly. It feels like with the loss of crippling paranoia came an inability to pick up on anything. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. Even he can’t be expected to know when he’s being lied to, and he hates nothing more, whether by falsehood or withholding information.

It’s a whole lot to ask from people who don’t receive the same in kind, he realizes, and so he doesn’t. Not really, though he’ll play the part because sometimes expectation leads to results. But from people he cares about? People who are suppose to care about him? He refuses to accept it.

He blinks, another realization coming into focus.

Maybe the problem is that Pete never did?

When they were kids, Gary’d been all but forced on Pete. The children of family friends, practically raised together and he’s got pictures upon pictures hidden in a box under his bed at home to prove it.

Pete’d never had much of an option, their lives entangled since the crib.

Other kids though, the ones who were given a chance to form an objectionable opinion? Well, they almost always did, hated Gary whether he’d earned it or not, though more often than not, it was a result of him playing into opinions preset by their parents.

Bullworth didn’t know how to handle him. It hadn’t boded well for Pete’s chances by association.

He fully admits to it, but he refuses to take responsibility for it. It wasn’t his choice either, regardless of his feelings toward it or how he benefited from their parents’ arrangement. He didn’t choose to be such a big part of Pete’s life.

And the thing is, Pete is charming. He’s infinitely more sociable and pleasant enough, he could have easily managed to sway people’s opinion of him if he really wanted.

The truth of the matter is Pete hates everyone in Bullworth as much as Gary does.

So he misses Jimmy, a whole lot more than he wants anyone to know as an independent individual who can obviously cope with whatever life chooses to throw at him, but Gary’s been told that relationships come and go. Losing Pete, and realizing he might not have had him for a while, that’s a hard thing to handle.

One instance does not a rule make, but he doesn’t want to be one of those oblivious fucks who can’t catch a hint when one’s offered, and he won’t allow an ass to be made of himself by not accepting what’s been made crystal clear in one look.

Pete’s out, hard as that is to accept.

He’s going to accept it like the mature, rational adult he’s slowly growing into. He isn’t going to freak out, or whine, or make a scene because Peter Kowalski doesn’t want to be his friend anymore.

Funny thing is, he’d always assumed Pete would be above picking sides.

He doesn’t blame him obviously; Gary never was on the winning side.

—

On Wednesdays, Gary sees a therapist recommended to him in his last week at Happy Volts by one of the nicer orderlies who didn’t think they’d be seeing him back in a month’s time.

He doesn’t have to, it wasn’t mandated at the the time of his release like the biweekly appointments with a psychologist back at Happy Volts to ensure his meds were appropriately balanced after months of being doped up on whatever would keep him docile.

The psychologist was nice enough for a Happy Volts employee, but he didn’t particularly appreciate a detached approach towards his mental health. There was something irritating about a lady responding to the news that he’d been puking twice a day since the new dosage with an emotionless ‘interesting’ and a scribbled prescription for a different ratio of meds.

Those appointments stopped being necessary a year and a half ago, leaving him feeling balanced and relieved that for the first time, a professional agreed that he was not only capable of functioning in society, but that he was on the right path to do so.

It had been the best day of his life, celebratory sex and all. Especially the sex, but he’s been trying really hard not to think about that anymore. It just serves to make him angry, and it’s more pathetic than he can handle to pout about your past sex life.

And it’s not even that he misses sex. He’d gone plenty of years without sex and he was capable of getting through plenty more; it’s an irrelevant factor in his life.

Sex with Jimmy though, he misses that a lot.

Gary’s therapist hates him, he knows the man does, but he’s also a money hungry professional about it. The way he figures it, the only way anyone is going to listen to his problems and pretend to care–especially now that Jimmy is out of his life–is if they’re getting paid.

Is he ashamed to have gotten to a point in his life where he both wants to talk about his feelings and is willing to pay for someone to listen? Absolutely, but allowing his pride to stand in the way of getting better has had some pretty shit results thus far.

Gary is stubborn, but he’s not stupid.

The worst of it is the way the man hums patronizingly and responds to everything he says with, “And how do you think that affects the people around you?” like because Gary has chosen to ignore the consequences of his actions on others in the past, his feelings now are invalidated.

He knows not everything can be about him, but from day one, he’s been struggling to make anything about him.

It just goes to show why Gary works so hard not to bring feelings into the equation. Everything is so much easier if he can answer for everything with a detached air. Investing himself emotionally is so draining, and he’s only speaking from the experience of what he’s suffering now because of it.

If he were Pete, who seems to invest himself wholly in everything he does, he’d probably off himself.

“How has your week been, Gary?” the man asks while Gary fidgets about the room.

In the beginning, he’d tried to sit in the chair opposite the man like he was suppose to. That’d quickly become a problem; he’s never been like he’s suppose to for one thing. Gary needs the freedom to move and fidget, and unlike the other people Gary’d interacted with on a regular basis, this man doesn’t care in what manner Gary chooses to talk to him, or even if Gary chooses to talk to him at all in their scheduled hour.

Maybe that just makes it all more clear that the man’s only in it for the money, and that would upset other people, but he’s not here under the impression that the therapist is his friend. He just wants the man to make sense of his feelings, and he does that when Gary chooses to talk, so Gary talks.

“Pretty shitty,” he admits, fiddling with the leaves of a fake plant in the corner.

“And why is that?”

The man writes something on his notepad. Gary hates that, the way that doctors have a way of hearing something insignificant and finding something to write about from it.

“Boyfriend broke up with me. Kinda sucks,” he mumbles, trying not to think about it too hard.

“When you say ‘kinda’, you mean-?”

Gary thinks about it, about what he’s willing to admit out loud and what he’s even willing to admit to himself. It’s safer keeping things to himself, but it isn’t actually safe. It’s just something he needs to keep reminding himself of.

“I just don’t know why he broke up with me.”

Glasses being taken off is a sign that the man isn’t going to hold back his words. It’s something that Gary fears every appointment and one of the reasons he spends very little time making eye contact with the man. Unfortunately, he’s gotten particularly good at picking up on the sound of it.

He flinches, preparing himself.

“If you knew why, would you be less upset?”

‘No,’ Gary thinks, he wouldn’t. He’s upset he doesn’t know why, it makes him anxious to not know what to take from this experience, but it wouldn’t make him less upset to understand why. He still wouldn’t have Jimmy. He still wouldn’t have been good enough.

“It’s inconvenient is all,” he says instead, spinning to face the man.

“Other people’s feelings are often inconvenient,” the man explains, dropping his notepad on the desk in front of him. “We’ve come to know each other quite well over the years, Gary. Do you want to know what I think?”

Gary doesn’t want to know what he thinks, not when he starts it off like that. They don’t know each other at all. He knows Gary based on what Gary has shared with him and his own professional experience, and that’s the end of their relationship.

This is not a conversation between equals on any level.

“I think that you know exactly why Mr. Hopkins broke up with you. In fact, in the almost two years you’ve been coming here, I think you’ve listed plenty of reasons why he should, so it comes as no surprise to you why he finally did.”

He gapes, swallowing back a reaction reminiscent of who he was at sixteen. If there’s anything he wants more than to knock the guy out, it’s to not be who he was at sixteen.

“I-”

“Get over it, Mr. Smith. That’s my advice for you. Move on with people you don’t have burning bridges with or those bridges are going crumble with you underneath them.”

He says it like it’s so simple. Bullworth isn’t like other places. Gary may not know everyone in town, but everyone in town certainly knows him. Knows him as part of the founding family. As a childish nuisance. As the maniac who overthrew order at the Academy. As Jimmy Hopkin’s pet project.

Get over it? Easier said than done.

There is no one else, and Gary’s always found fire pretty romantic.

—

He’s furious.

That’s what he has to tell himself to explain away the violent swirling inside his stomach, like all the times Jimmy ended a fight with that disappointed but wholly unsurprised look he’d perfected in the years of their relationship. Like Gary was proving all the bad things people expected of him right.

Or when someone pointed out just how lucky Gary was, how privileged, because Jimmy could have chosen anyone and he’d chosen to saddle himself with Gary’s broken ass.

Shame, deep seated and miserable shame, burning him from the inside out.

He swears under his breath, ripping his sweater over his head with zero finesse to draw himself out of his thoughts. There’s no point in dwelling on that, not when he spent so much time during the relationship obsessing over it.

Sometime during Gary’s stint in Happy Volts, Pete had gone out and bought a full-body mirror with cracked paint and unidentifiable stains on the glass. At least, that’s the state the mirror had been in when Gary got back, and he finds it hard to believe Pete would have done anything to it to get it to this stage of wreck.

He’d teased the boy mercilessly about buying it, but that hadn’t stopped him from repainting it and replacing the glass. And if he scribbled dicks and swear words all over it, well, Gary doesn’t do nice things without repercussions.

The point is, even with the crude decoration, the mirror looks a million time better and he gets as much use out of it as Pete does. It’s useful, helpful when there’s nobody around to bounce ideas off of.

Making eye contact with his reflection, unhappy with the blatant emotion he finds, he considers his options.

It’s a nice day, just the beginning hours of evening. Not quite freezing, but the leaves are changing colors and the days are short enough to appreciate the sun while it’s out. Even so, he doesn’t want to face the world anymore today. Not alone.

Not when being outside will be just as lonely as the darkness of the dorm room, but will leave him feeling infinitely more vulnerable. He’s tired of feeling exposed, watched, judged.

There’s gossip, he knows there is, but he hasn’t been privy to it, and that makes it all that much worse.

With that decided, he shimmies his jeans down his legs, shivering as the chill of the room nips at his exposed skin. He hates the way his body deals with temperature, running hot but always cold. Hiding in the warmth and safety of his bed feels like the only thing he’s ever wanted at this point in time.

Today was a bad day. A really bad day actually, but barring dinner, which he hasn’t even decided whether he’s going to or not, it’s over. And that means another day he’s held it all together. Another day closer to not caring about it anymore.

That’s almost the end of it, but for some reason he can’t really explain, his eyes are drawn to the one spot in the mirror that sends his world crashing around him. He sucks in a harsh breath, fingers clenching painfully, nails biting into his palms.

It’s been over a week since they broke up, but they’d also had sex pretty recently the day of and that meant some physical reminders of their relationship had been left behind.

Jimmy was sweet with him in all the ways Gary had allowed him to be, but Gary wasn’t Pinky and he wasn’t Gord or any of the other people Jimmy had had sex with in the past. He liked the bite that came along with knowing someone would take care of you afterwards.

He liked the sweetness, but he loved the bruises.

There’s one in particular on his hip that was always purple and blossoming. Jimmy liked to dig his fingers in there when Gary got too mouthy or too quiet. Gary liked it too, the sharp pain during and the reminder afterward that took forever to fade and hardly any work to refresh.

It doesn’t make any sense why this is the thing that breaks him. The bruise being there hadn’t made them any less broken up, but the thrum of pain when he accidentally bumped against something was comforting. Grounding.

Now it’s gone, and so is the anchoring security that he knows really left with Jimmy.

There’s something warm and wet running down his face. He swipes at it, disgust bubbling up to mix with the shame when the hand he pulls back in covered in what are clearly tears.

Gary doesn’t cry; it doesn’t change anything, a waste of time for people incapable of rolling with the hand they were dealt. He’s strong than this. Better than this.

Never before has he been so grateful for an empty room, falling face first into his bed. Fingers burying themselves in the sheets, he burrows under his mountain of blankets, hoping for a place to hide. Or suffocate, either works for him right now.

The sound of the door, crooked and hanging too low on one side, scraping across the floor. He flinches, biting his lip to hide any sounds that might give away his current state. Silence.

“What are you doing?” Pete asks.

“Nothing. Go away,” he demands, proud of the way the harshness disguises the hitch of his breath.

“Did something happen? Someone say something?” the boy presses, but Gary takes note in the way he sounds more curious than concerned. Fuck that. Gary is not going to be anyone’s source of amusement.

He laughs, uncomfortable and gross under the combined heat of crying and being under blankets.

“People are always saying shit, Pete.  Wouldn’t get very far if I worried about it every time it happened.”

“Figure you won’t get very far either way, to be honest,” he says, offhandedly like he didn’t just reaffirm every fear Gary’s had since preschool.

Pete knows, he fucking knows, because Gary has told him. Has confided those feelings to him on multiple occasions growing up, been reassured just as many times that he was more than a mixed up brain chemistry and personality issues.

“You talk a lot of shit for a last choice faggot,” Gary shoots back, but there’s no heat behind it and it falls flat. He can practically hear Pete’s smile.

“I may get picked last, but at least I don’t fuck it up. Every. Time.”

Another wave of fresh tears sear into the flesh of his cheeks, and he shoves his face further into the mattress to stop them. The sound of the door opening again and closing with a soft click signaling just how little this exchange affected Pete releases the flood gates, the sheets below him soaking quickly.

His body wracks, breaths coming out stuttered and far less often than they should, a combination that leaves him dizzy and nauseous when paired with everything else.

He’s becoming a pathetic mess, and it’s all Jimmy Hopkins fault.

It’s too bad he refuses to take responsibility.

—

Friday use to be Gary’s favorite day of the week.

Gary likes to think that he and Jimmy had a pretty healthy relationship considering the circumstances that it was built on. What he wanted and what he expected were often put in two separate boxes, one of which he hid from the light of day.

Monopolizing Jimmy’s time had never been something he was interested in. He wanted his attention, more intensely than he’d ever wanted attention in his life and felt it was something he was owed, but he never once expected all of his time.

Though he was having a hard time appreciating the abundance of it now, Gary liked time to himself a lot.

Weekends didn’t belong to Gary. Not always. Not even most of the time.

Jimmy had friends, way more people he enjoyed hanging out with than Gary thought should be possible in Bullworth, and responsibilities that came with holding such a high regard in small town hierarchy. That was fine. Gary just did something else, like hang out with Pete, or by himself, or on a few not particularly well thought out weekends, he visited his mom.

Keeping himself busy wasn’t ever a problem. Despite how this breakup is making him out to be, Gary is a functioning person with interests and a long standing disinterest in social interaction.

The point was, weekends weren’t guaranteed but Fridays belonged to him. From the time the school bell released them until what ever time Saturday morning he couldn’t continue to convince Jimmy to stay in bed, his time was Gary’s.

Now, Fridays make Gary miserable.

School, whilst being mind-numbingly boring, gives his Adderall induced focus something to worry about that isn’t his life slowly falling apart with no outward signs of change. He wishes it were as easy as thinking about something else, but he can’t remember a time in his running memory where he had even the slightest control over his thought process.

The fact of the matter is he needs something else to obsess over. It comes in the form of a phone call from his dad.

Normally, he screens calls like these. Nothing good comes from more than twenty seconds of contact with his father, and things have been known to fall to shit in even that period of time. As it is, he’s hoping something will come of it that’ll make him angry for at least until the weekend ends.

Nothing distracts him more than his distaste for his parents.

“Gary,” the man starts off, before Gary has even acknowledged his call. He’s convinced the guy has trained himself to pick up the sounds a call being connected, which is slightly terrifying and all the more promising for his desired enragement.

“Daddy,” Gary greets, a small smile tugging at his lips at the perceived annoyance he can feel coming through the phone at the familiar name. It pisses him off, so Gary’s never called him anything else.

Any arguments expressing otherwise can fuck themselves as far as he’s concerned.

“Come on now, none of that. Honestly.”

“None of what, Daddy?” he asks innocently, pinning the phone to his ear with his shoulder as he maneuvers everything in his hands into his locker. A freshman shoots him a strange look in passing but is quick to scuttle away when he flips them off in response.

Maturity is a slow process, but he’s not going to change completely.

His dad sighs, giving in completely, and Gary physically deflates at the lack of fight. Semi-respectful dad is not the father he’s looking for right now.

“Your mother wants to know-”

“Well, why doesn’t she just call me herself,” he interrupts, gripping his phone again as he makes his way out of the building. He’s not certain where he wants to go yet, but certainly not the dorm which is always crowded first thing Friday afternoon.

Another sigh, but no yelling. He’s starting to accept that there just won’t be a fight this phone call. A complete shame.

“We both are concerned about whether or not you’ve been putting thought into your future,” the man corrects, the epitome of patience.

“You’re fucking kidding me, right?”

“Really with that language?” his dad mumbles. “I know you’ve been going to therapy and all that nonsense-”

“Hardly nonsense, but thanks.”

“Anyway,” he continues, cough familiar to Gary from all the times he’s been to work with the man as a child. Fake polite, Gary’s favorite. “We know you’ve been putting effort in, but have you considered what you’re going to do with your clean bill of health?”

“Wait, I have to be mentally stable and do something? What’s that about?” He walks down the front stairs and along the side of the building towards the parking lot. If nothing else, he can scavenge for cigarettes in the auto-shop.

Greaser germs are gross, but so is nicotine withdrawal.

And hey, there’s Gary’s silver lining in all of this. He doesn’t have somebody harping about his health anymore. If he wants to chain smoke himself to death, he can do so without the fear of someone having to mourn him.

“Yes, very funny,” the man huffs, and Gary can make out the sound of a glass hitting wood. Bourbon. Probably not using a coaster, another ring soaking into the wood of a precious family heirloom. He can imagine the taste of his father’s study, clouded with cigar smoke.

It almost feels like home.

“Yeah? You really think so, Daddy? A promising career in comedy maybe?”

“Yes, maybe,” the man responds, voice tinged thick with unfamiliar fondness that sends Gary’s stomach plummeting. He refuses to accept this, this affection from a man who spent most of his life shaking Gary from his leg. Who spent more nights out of town than in since weeks after Gary’s birth.

He tosses his bag away, pleased at the heavy thud as it makes contact with the side of the old bus. Sliding down to sit with his legs sprawled out in front of him, he picks at the loose rubber of the tire against his back.

One day, Gary’s going to take a damn bat to this thing. Nothing would satisfy him more.

“I’ll look into schools,” he promises dismissively, hoping to end this sooner rather than later.

“You can look into all the schools you want, but if you don’t have something in mind…”

He growls, sliding his knees up so he can curl into them, head leaned back into the empty space between the tire and the bus’ metal frame. The sky is clear and calm, very much the opposite of his mind.

“I don’t know,” he says, sounding more petulant than he wants, but he’s frustrated with this new issue he has to deal with. It’s his own fault. He should have been more concerned about the future without being pressed by his parents, but he’d started to think it was going to be a joint decision and now everything is on him.

“You don’t have to know. I just want you to think about it. Listen, we love you, Gary-” He sounds so sincere, it makes Gary sick.

“Okay,” he mumbles.

“Gary-”

“Okay!”

He stabs the end call button, throwing the phone at his bag. It lands with a cushioned bounce, something he’ll be grateful for later but only makes him angrier now.

In a few days, his mom will call. It’s the predictable result of him yelling at his dad on the phone. He use to take secret comfort in it because he knows his mom cares just as much as he’s coming to realize that his shitty dad doesn’t want to hate him.

Growing up is hard. Realizing all the things he’s wrong about is hard. Not fucking up anymore feels near impossible.

It was easier when he had someone who cared whether he fucked up or not, but these days it seems like he could disappear for good and nobody would notice until they went to question why things had been so good lately.

Well, it wasn’t a fight per se, but his dad had definitely given him something to distract himself with.

Apparently the man was good for something.

—

The weekend passes slowly, a reasonable thing to happen when he spends the entirety of it curled in his bed watching Netflix at 480p on the smudged, chipped screen of his phone. What he doesn’t do is think about what his dad said.

It’s not like he doesn’t want to sort out his life. He’d like nothing more than to have some sort of game plan to follow, but he spent a whole lot of time growing up under the impression he wasn’t going to get far in life. That’s a hard thing to overcome, and he’s doing the best he can.

If he’s learned anything, it’s that things change quickly and without warning. Adapting to them takes a bit longer.

Pete comes and goes throughout the weekend without so much as a glance towards his unmoving lump of a roommate, something Gary ignores with a dedication that comes from years of being dismissed.

The thing is, Gary’s not actively ignoring Pete back. If Pete’s going to pretend he’s not there, Gary’s going to pretend he’s not there either. Leave Pete to the misery of Bullworth; Gary’d much rather be lost in the world of New New York. At least there, people know what their purpose in life is, imbedded slave monkey chips notwithstanding.

That’s a little pathetic he realizes, coming from a boy who spent most of his life vocalizing an admiration for military leaders like Hitler. But that’s growing up for you. He just doesn’t have time to offend people for the sake of offending them anymore.

Clearly he’s busy with more important things like not showering for two days and binge-watching Futurama.

He makes it to Sunday night before the phone call he’s expecting cuts off the episode he’s only half paying attention to.

The noise he makes is comparable to a heavily wounded animal begging for death. It definitely freaks Pete out, emphasized by the sound of ceramic clattering against wood. He probably knocked over the cup he keeps his pencils in. Were the circumstances different, Gary would probably find that really funny.

As it is, Pete can suck a fat one.

“Ma,” he greets, sugar sweet because even though it’s clearly fake, she’ll complain if he doesn’t. He rolls onto his back, flinging the blankets off of himself as it gets harder to breathe. The air feels amazing after hours in his nest.

“Your father tells me you had a little episode on the phone,” she says, cutting straight to it. That’s his mom for you though, no pleasantries. An old habit from growing up where she did. It drives his dad crazy, and he figures that might have something to do with why she never grew out of it like she did other things.

Gary rolls his eyes, throwing one arm over his face. He has a headache, thrumming insistently now that he’s not distracted with the mind-numbing idiocricy of satirical cartoons.

This kind of pain, the kind that doesn’t dull over time but remains vicious until it goes away, is unbearable. Headaches make him irritable. Normally, he’d take over Jimmy’s bed until the other boy conceded to whatever it was he did that made them go away. Petting, or whatever. Gary’s not sure what to classify it other than fantastic.

It’s not an option now, for obvious reasons, and it makes him just that much crankier.

“Did he use the word ‘episode’ or are you just stirring the pot?”

“I admit I maybe be paraphrasing a bit. What happened to my little boy who was happy to criminalize his father regardless?” She sounds amused. Not as strange as his father’s attitude earlier, but he does have to wonder what he’s missing in the house these days.

Probably sex, his dad has been in town more with all the expansion that’s happening in Bullworth. If that’s the case, he’s happy to be at school. The only thing worse than his parents fighting are the honeymoon phases they seem to keep falling into.

“You do actually love the man you’re throwing under the bus right now, don’t you?” he mumbles.

“Oh sweetheart, love doesn’t halt a feud, That’s what makes it so fun.”

Oh, and doesn’t he know it.

“Gross, Ma.”

She laughs, ugly and genuine and not at all the delicate way she laughs during dinner parties. His mom snorts when she finds something really funny, muffled between hands. Embarrassed because it’s not attractive.

He knows for a fact his dad loves it. Just not at parties where everyone might notice he married a New Coventry girl because of who she is and not despite it.

“How is therapy going?” she asks, delving into topics his dad wouldn’t touch if you paid him.

“He told me to drop everyone who knows me. Doesn’t make for good relationships.”

“Oh, well. He’s not a Bullworth man, so what would he know?” He can hear the sigh in her voice, dreamy  and not entirely sarcastic. She romanticizes the harshness of Bullworth a lot. It’s weird that recently, he seems to find himself doing the same thing. “What’s a relationship without the other person having witnessed the worst period of your life?”

“Functional, apparently,” he deadpans, snorting when she scoffs.

“Who needs functional?” She sounds so offended and sure of herself.

Jimmy, he wants to say, but it’s not something he wants to get into while Pete’s in the room. That’d be just like the other boy, eavesdrop on Gary’s conversation and then run to Jimmy to have a good laugh about how pathetic Gary is with his feelings.

His mother though, clever as she is, picks up on his silence.

“Is everything okay, baby?” she asks, voice soft the way she is with her cats, sincere and sweet. It amazes him to this day the transformation his mother takes when he’s truly upset.

As broken as they are, messed up and turned around, their family makes do. That’s the Smith way.

“I just don’t know what I’m doing,” he admits. “About the thing you’re so worried about.”

“Have you talked to Jimmy about it?”

He chances a glance at Pete, not entirely reassured by the way his face is buried in his sketchbook. Pete gets lost in drawing easily, but he’s not dumb either. The boy knows how to play oblivious when the time calls for it.

“I don’t much talk to him these days,” he mumbles.

She’s putting the pieces together, he can feel it in the silence that follows. The final click resonates in the soft ‘Oh’ she gives, fingers drumming against glass. Irritation or discomfort, but he’s not sure why she would be feeling either.

“Love makes things harder, that is true, but when you’ve planned for love and end up scrambling on your own, that’s when things get complicated.”

“Is that suppose to mean something to me?” he groans.

She gets like this sometimes, serious and spouting advice in the form of riddles like some carnie psychic. Gary wants to blame the Greek in her, whether that’s insensitive to his culture or not.

“You’re a smart boy. Tactless, and cocky, and far too fond of pushing people to prove themselves for you, but you wouldn’t be my child if that weren’t the case. You can do whatever you set your mind to, but you need to set your mind to something.”

“I don’t know; you’re not listening,” he whines, kicking his legs and hissing when the movement of his mini-tantrum sets off a sharp, focused pain in his head.

“You’re clever, Gary. You’ll figure something out.” She sounds sure, and he knows better than to question his mother when she thinks she’s right, but it doesn’t halt the doubts.

“That’s what I told Dad,” he says, curling onto his side to stare at Pete who is still intently sketching at his desk. He remembers a time when this would have been normal. A comforting lull where Pete draws, and occasionally Gary would ask him questions. They’d talk.

When the silence was lazy and not thick with unspoken hostility.

“Hm, yes. That would explain it.”

“What are you talking about?” he asks, feeling like he’s playing into something. His mother is the queen of using vague statements to trick people into listening to what she has to say. He learned from the best.

“Your father is a planner, baby. There are two people who know how to push his buttons better than anyone else, and here we are,” she explains, sounding smug. “Though between you and me, he didn’t marry a New Coventry girl because we’re good at following directions. Giving them though…”

His parents are so in love and so at war, it’s sickening. It reminds him of something else he’d rather not think about.

“You disgust me,” he huffs, rolling to face the wall. There’s still bits of torn tape from the pictures he’d ripped down, buried shamefully in one of his dresser drawers. It’d been impossible to throw them away, though he’d tried.

“I try my hardest.”

He doesn’t doubt that.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm over [here](www.beathimbacktotheghetto.tumblr.com)


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